y purpose in what follows is to set the limits of a Marxist account of the star system in the popular cinema, which, in the West at least, is more or less coterminous with Hollywood. I take it that such an account must pay attention to the particularities of performance as a labour process, and the relations of production in which such a process occurs. This materialist thesis of the primacy of production relations over symbolic relations should not in itself be read as a denial of the particular effectivity of the symbolic, but I shall be unable to pursue such matters conclusively here. Evidently any consideration of the commodity form and the metabolism of exchange will be struck by the parallels between this process and signification proper. The work of Jean Baudrillard is a play on such parallelisms, which claims to show that the point of reference in the labour theory of value-use value-is in itself a social form, a signifier in the chain of signifiers imposed by bourgeois economy. 1 The extent to which this reading of Marx is valid is a question that cannot be addressed here. 2 Yet one can take consolation in the fact that the account offered limits itself very clearly to the terrain of political economy. If from the perspective of Baudrillard this constitutes a delineation of the'terroristic'imposition of the illusion of reference on the'play'of signifiers, this is precisely the spirit that animates the account here.